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Doug on Cloud

Cloud Pricing Obscured

Lots of items aren't clearly marked. Expensive restaurants take pride in not listing prices, car prices never bear much relation to actual cost, how the heck can you ever find out what the eBay reserve price is unless you bid all the way up to it?

High-end software, such as ERP, is often the same, with the bottom line as fluid as a government contract.

Cloud services, it seems, are just as bad. For something, like Office 365, you know exactly how hard you'll be hit. Platform and infrastructure services are murkier than a pina colada.

Fortunately there are tools that can help you nail this piece of cloud jello, which author David Davis brought to our attention. And you needn't fret about the cost; the tools we're talking about are absolutely free.

First up is CloudPriceCalculator.com, which dissects what Amazon EC2 will actually cost based on CPU, storage and memory.

SolarWinds has a cool new tool that figures out how much your VMware vSphere infrastructure would cost if moved from the data center to the cloud.

But if you are looking for direct help from VMware itself, don't bother. They have a Yellow pages-style listing of cloud providers with lots of detail, except price!

Are you confused by cloud pricing? Share your thoughts at dbarney@redmondmag.com.